


how the light gets in

by theclaravoyant



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Trans Character, torture mention, trans!Fitz
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-21
Updated: 2017-11-20
Packaged: 2018-12-05 01:11:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,727
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11567202
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theclaravoyant/pseuds/theclaravoyant
Summary: Jemma is worried about baring her scars from Giyera's torture to Fitz, but he has scars of his own and shows her that they're nothing to be ashamed of.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> T for references to surgery and torture.
> 
> Title from Leonard Cohen's "Anthem.

Jemma takes a deep breath, and lets the silk gown fall from her shoulders. It is smooth as it slides down to the floor, as smooth as the pale skin beneath, and Jemma lets go her breath, with a light shudder. She closes her eyes for a moment and asks herself, as gently as she can, for calm. 

When she opens her eyes, she watches her shoulders relax. A smile touches her face. She really is beautiful, with her strong shoulders and delicate breasts. She should be proud. She should be excited, to strut out there and show Fitz what he’s been missing, and it was not that long ago she would have done it without hesitation but now… 

Now she has this. 

She grimaces, and touches her fingers to some of the most puckered skin, near one of her hips. She bites her lip, at the stinging memory of the visceral pain that had, quite literally, torn into her that day. She’s still ashamed of the screaming. But shame doesn’t make the scars go away. 

They look like a surgery; incision points, where strips of metal had threaded through her like stitches. If he could have, Jemma wonders if Giyera would have tried to coat her bones in the stuff: to make her into a superhero, or at least a superweapon.

(It's too bad really. She would have loved to slit his throat with claws of his own making. But she swallows the thought.) 

It is too bad, that there’s nothing supernatural about these scars. Nothing special about them at all, except for the memories of the day she had betrayed the name of Agent and turned into a blubbering hysterical mess at the worst possible time. She should have kept her chin up, stayed strong, like any of the others would have done. She shouldn’t have let Fitz hear her scream, especially. He’d almost died because he couldn’t take it. 

(Could she have though, if it had been him?) 

A knock at the door shakes Jemma from her reverie and she jumps. 

“Jemma?” Fitz asks. “Are you okay?” 

There are tears in her eyes. This is not where the night was supposed to be going. 

When she takes too long to answer, Fitz pushes the door open. He sees her sorry state and wraps her up in his arms at once, already crooning sweet nothings, and Jemma feels a little sorry for herself and at the same time, somehow, the luckiest person in the world. 

“I’m sorry,” she sniffs. “I was just- thinking.”

Fitz lets her back to arms length with a frown. 

“About what? This?”

He nods back to the bedroom, and Jemma shakes her head. 

“No.” 

There’s nothing else for it now. She takes a deep breath and steps back a little further, so that he can see the scars. They litter her skin as if she’d walked in the way of a rogue staple gun, and Jemma sees the horror cross Fitz’s face at the sight of them. Breathless, he wonders –

“This was...?”

“Yeah.”

She wishes she had the dressing gown on to cover herself up again, and crosses her arms instead. It’s Fitz, just Fitz, she should have nothing to worry about, but she’s still coming to terms with the scars on her own body. With the reality of their existence. Sharing them with someone else, with someone like this, with a situation like this, it suddenly feels like she’s reached too far and she wants to shrink back into her shell. But Fitz doesn’t leer at her like the older boys did, the last time she’d felt exposed like this. 

(It has been a while. She loves her body – or rather, had loved it, and was trying to again. But that was beside the point.) 

He doesn’t even stare; somehow, he doesn’t bathe her in that overwhelmingly compassionate gaze of his. No, Fitz drops his eyes and –

And starts taking off his shirt? 

Jemma frowns. 

“No – Fitz – what are you doing?”

He pauses and looks up, and realises what it must look like.

“No, no,” he assures her. “I want to show you something.” 

He hesitates, just a little. Just like she did, before he pulls the material away. Instinctively, Jemma’s eyes roam his exposed chest, looking for what he had wanted to show her. She finds it quickly, like any keen scientist would, and her mouth hangs a little slack for a moment. It seems like something she should have noticed before but as she thinks on it, she begins to realise that she’s never seen him bare his chest. Except maybe once, after a bone dust incident, but they’d had bigger things on their minds at the time. Now, the smallest things are the most important in the world.

“Can I-?” she requests. 

“Go ahead.”

His are old scars, no longer raised or reddened. They’ve faded to thin white lines: one running under his pectorals, one around each areola, and a little T-junction between them. She thinks, at first, it’s the fading that he wants to show her.

It’s not. 

“What do you think?” he asks her.

She frowns, and thinks. 

“I think they’re… you.” 

“Are you just saying that to be diplomatic?” Fitz challenges. 

“No,” Jemma scoffs. “It doesn’t feel authentic to say they’re pretty though does it? They’re not. But they’re not ugly. Is that what you meant?”

Fitz shrugs.

“Sort of,” he explains. “I guess what I meant is… They don’t have to be anything to be ashamed of. I mean obviously they’re different. Mine were voluntary and helped me achieve a positive change in my life. Yours were… involuntary.” (He leaves it at that). “But they happened, and you came out the other side and you should be proud of that. They may not have made you a better person or whatever, but you are a good person. And a beautiful one. Your scars don’t have the power to change that. They’re yours. You aren’t theirs.” 

Jemma smirks fondly. Fitz smirks back. 

“Turns out therapy does have a few good one-liners,” he quips, but he can see the meaning of it begin to settle over her. She frowns to herself and looks down, re-examining the marred stretch of her belly in light of this new perspective. Tears prick at her eyes once again as pain, frustration, and tenderness tug at her heartstrings. 

“But…” she murmurs. “These aren’t me.” 

“That doesn’t mean they can’t be beautiful,” Fitz promises. 

She blinks up at him, forlorn and wondrous, and he wonders if this is what it feels like for her when he gives her that look. The one she’s always talking about, that makes her want to pull out her heart and give it to him. 

(She never says it like that, of course. She’s not so poetic. But he gets it.) 

Fortunately, by largely unspoken agreement between the two of them, he gets to be as poetic as he likes, so he steps closer to Jemma until he can touch her. He keeps his distance and reaches out, and she doesn’t flinch away even as his finger runs over that same puckered line that she had reminisced on earlier.

“Look, they are yours,” he repeats, his voice low. “So I will ignore them entirely if you want me to. But I think they could be beautiful if you wanted them to be. Like flowers or diamonds or…” 

“Stars?” Jemma offers quietly, as if she’s just catching onto the concept and doesn’t want to be incorrect. Fitz smiles. 

“Stars. Perfect.” 

Jemma is sure that he’s thinking of the velvety night sky they’ve looked upon together so many times. That he sees her skin as the expanse of the cosmos – with which he has a much better relationship these days – and her scars as the shining jewels scattered over its surface. She has more of a fiery vision – a get-too-close-and-they’ll-burn-you vision – but she also thinks that she might see what he sees one day. Stars in her soul. Not just these ones, but every scar, every struggle (and every joy, of which she hopes there’ll be plenty - and some of those might leave scars too). All of them burning brightly in the tapestry of her life story.

She smiles.

Fitz smiles back, and they share a soft and comforting kiss. But they know when to let a breakthrough sit. Fitz bends down and picks up Jemma’s fallen dressing gown, and she slips into it like a sigh.

“You know,” Fitz offers, opening the door for Jemma back into their room. “I did get icecream, in case that chocolate sauce idea didn’t pan out.” 

Jemma snorts. 

“You were never going to lick chocolate sauce off me.” 

“Well now I guess we’ll never know, will we?” 

Fitz keeps a straight face somehow, and Jemma shakes her head, laughing. She’s a little surprised to find that he actually has bought chocolate sauce – and Chunky Monkey Banana Split icecream to put it on. She fetches the spoons and he the bowls and they meet back at the bench with a smile.

“Now,” Fitz offers, “Are you feeling more _Breakfast at Tiffany’s_ or _Planet of the Apes?”_


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a continuation, prompted by "tender" for FitzSimmons Appreciation Week, and "Jemma gets a tattoo" by anon

Jemma takes a deep breath, and draws the washcloth over her skin. Much of the redness has faded now, and her skin has resumed its creamy glow but for the puckered scars and the silver and blue lines that now decorate them.

Stars.

That’s what they have always reminded her of – at least, ever since she had decided as much, not so long ago. Otherwise, they are pain and torment. She much prefers the duality of it all; the blistering heat and the guiding signs blurring together as they dance across her skin. Each of the marks her torturer left is now crowned by its own tiny cluster of stars, put there by her own will, and some of them illustrated by constellations. Out of what was done to her she has made a sky of possibilities; she has made a symbol; she has made art. She has made something of which she can be proud, and as she steps out of the shower and onto the mat she delays, for the first time in too long, wrapping herself up in a towel.

She stares.

She stares at her body in the mirror, so unfamiliar and yet, unquestionably her own. She stares at the way a map of the stars seems to move as she does, as if she and the cosmos are one and the same. It feels like too much power to have: as if she is too big and far too small for her own skin all at once. Yet she holds her chin high. She has endured and come out beautiful, and it may not be the beauty that she is used to, but she’ll be damned if she doesn’t show it off.

She smiles.

“Fitz?”

_“Hm?”_

He sounds distracted, but when she walks out into their bedroom he is anything but. His eyes sweep toward her instinctively, and when she doesn’t flinch away from his attention on her body – as she has done since the scars, and the bruising new tattoos - he stops to drink her in. The magazine he is reading slides off his lap, his jaw slackens a little, and he marvels.

“Are you - ? Are they - ?”

The temptation still tingles in her fingers, that she should wrap her arms around her body and hide away, but with a newfound air of confidence, she finds it easier to resist. She crosses the floor and climbs onto the bed in front of Fitz, taking his hand and placing it on her own hip. His whole palm and all his fingers stretch out, hungry to touch her, and she realises that she hasn’t let him – not like this – since it happened.

“They’re ready,” Jemma promises. “My stars. I decided you were right. I wanted to make them beautiful. I just needed a little help… seeing them differently.”

Fitz scoffs.

“Well,” he points out. “I can help with that.”

He holds her eyes for a moment longer, making sure that she is truly comfortable before his eyes wander down to her neck; her breasts; her stomach. One of his hands is still fixed at her hip and the other trails over her skin, hesitant to touch the scars themselves. He is not proud of his own and he wonders what will happen if he touches hers the wrong way (because whatever she says now, there must be a wrong way.)

Then Jemma takes his hand, and demands the attention of his eyes again. Just briefly.

“It’s okay,” she promises; slowly, enunciating the words so that he absorbs and believes them.

He does, and then his lips collide with hers, struggling to communicate the pride and joy and beauty and oddly nostalgic type of love that has seized him. Maybe, he thinks, she feels the same as she kisses back with the same kind of passion, the same kind of yearning.

When they step back to take a breath, Jemma catches the side of his face. Runs a finger over his cheek and his jaw. Holds his forehead against her own, so that they look down together at her body. This time, as Fitz trails from one cluster of stars to the next, he runs his finger over the scarred tissue and around it, as if he is painting them himself.

“What do you think?” Jemma asks, a little breathless with anticipation. Fitz wonders if she is expecting  _they’re you_ ; a callback to their last conversation, and the last time he was allowed to study her with such intensity. Instead he says:

“They’re beautiful.”

And she smiles and laughs a little, because of course that’s the kind of thing a sap like him would say.

“Do you have them-“ he begins,

“-On the back?” she anticipates, and with another deep breath she turns around, so that he can see them stretch out over her shoulders, her spine, her ribcage, her hips. She can feel it all in his touch – the horror, the sorrow, and the admiration – as he runs a finger down her back.

As he passes, she feels her muscles relax, again and again. They are reluctant to let go of their tension, but Fitz coaxes it all from them until Jemma is lying down in their blankets and he has not just a finger, but both hands drawing over her back. It’s a soft and gentle massage at first – he does not wish to aggravate any tissue problems she might be having – but soon enough he cannot help himself and he’s leaning down to kiss her shoulder, her spine, her ribcage, her hips. She sighs into the blanket and whispers again –

_“Fitz.”_

“Sorry,” he says, “did you want me to stop?”

There’s a smile in his voice, as if he knows the answer will be:

“No.”

But he doesn’t expect her to roll over and reach for him again, carding her fingers through his hair because she, too is starved for touch. She too longs to tell him how beautiful he is, in ways that words cannot express. He gets the essence of it though; he tastes it on her skin, as he resumes his kissing pattern; he feels it in the way that she moves - always receptive, greeting him and thanking him, and guiding him to where she wants him.

It’s rare, these days, that they spend time so entwined with one another and yet, so silent. Most of the time, they are working too hard for a second glance – or else, they are making the most of every second to update each other, educate each other, joke and banter with each other. They vocalize plenty of love too, of course, but there is something to be said for the tender pleasure of two lovers in mutual silence – something that they have been missing, of late.

The air does not tingle around them tonight, with nerves or humour or sexual tension to be teased and strutted about. Rather, it seems to wrap itself around them like a blanket, lulling them gently so that when they do at last fall asleep it is with an easy rhythm and a softness that has eluded them for far too long – at last, no longer.


End file.
